I have been using the Beta version of SOLR 4.0 for quite some time now and have been really looking forward to this book coming out. Having owned Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server before this one, this has been well overdue for me to buy.

The bits I liked the most about this book are the sections on the Data Import Handler, the longingly wanted updating of single fields in documents and faceting! Faceting has been an absolute livesaver for generating navigation and breadcrumbs for my ecommerce website projects and this book goes into more details.

I generally like these books because they always back up every explanation with an example, so if it doesn't quite give you what you were looking for it at least leaves you in a place when you can find your own way from there.

I really enjoyed the hands-on approach of this book, each chapter is divided in a 3 parts: 1. what you're going to do, 2. how to do it, 3. how it works. This makes the book easier to read and more usable as a reference when you're actually using the learned knowledge.But be warned, this book isn't for Solr beginners. Some of the queries and configurations are quite complex and hard to follow, so a basic Solr/jetty knowledge is required!